From the Forest (35 page)

The Purgatory Wood not only has a sinister atmosphere, it also has a dark history. The name was adopted because the wood is planted alongside the Purgatory Burn. The Purgatory Burn marked the western boundary of the leper colony beside Loch Derry, five miles away from where I entered the forest. The care of lepers in the Middle Ages was managed primarily by the Church – the very first leper colony in Britain was founded by Lanfranc, William I’s Archbishop of Canterbury, deep in the forest of the Blean in Kent in 1084 – and the monks from the Cistercian Abbey in Glen Luce, down on the coast, gathered lepers at Barlure – now an attractive farmhouse a few miles south of my home. I am unclear where these lepers came from initially. Leprosy (both ‘true’ leprosy – Hansen’s disease, caused by the bacteria
Mycobacterium leprae
and identified in 1873 – and the various other skin complaints mistakenly identified as ‘leprosy’) was widespread in Britain in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries but not common, so the inhabitants of this colony must have been drawn from an extensive area. When a sufficient number of sufferers had been collected at Barlure, they were led or driven away up onto the high moor and sent across the burn. It was called the Purgatory Burn because, once across it, they could never return; Purgatory in Catholic theology is not the same as Hell – it is a sort holding place where less-than-perfect souls can be refined after death until they are fully fit for heaven. There were no forests on the peat moors then, just long stretches of high rough country, a wild, desolate terrain in which to live out a grim and desolating fate.

The track I took into the Purgatory Wood meets the Southern Upland Way as it climbs up from New Luce, and a single path crosses the Purgatory Burn and runs eastward to Laggangairn (where there is a very smart little modern bothy beside that ruined farmhouse), and then beyond it to the Laggangairn standing stones – the last vestiges of a Bronze Age stone circle, carved with eighth-century Christian graffiti left by the pilgrims to St Ninian’s shrine at Whithorn; from there it leads to Kilgallioch, ‘the Ladies’ House’, a nunnery, though whether to serve the lepers, the pilgrims or both is now unknown; and eventually makes it way past the (completely vanished) colony itself on the banks of Loch Derry, before beginning the lovely descent into the Cree Valley. But I was not going so far on Christmas Eve – not in all that cold snow, and with sunset early and the dark gathering before half-past three.

I went to the Purgatory Wood on Christmas Eve with nefarious intent. I went to steal a tree.

The tradition of bringing an evergreen coniferous tree into the house and decorating it for Christmas is of surprisingly recent origin. It seems to have started in Livonia (now Latvia and Estonia) on the Baltic coast in the fifteenth century. But it did not spread beyond urban areas in northern Germany until the early eighteenth century, and took a long time to move south down the Rhine, because the Catholic majority of southern Germany considered it a Protestant custom. (This is slightly ironic because it is now protestant fundamentalists who object to Christmas trees.)
¹
The practice was disseminated throughout Europe mainly through the influence of assorted German princesses marrying widely across the continent. The Hanoverians brought the tradition to Britain.

It is not true that Prince Albert introduced Christmas trees. (In fact, Queen – then Princess – Victoria described a Christmas tree in her journal when she was 13.) This popular myth about Prince Albert’s role seems to have arisen from the following odd little circumstance. In 1848 the
Illustrated London News
published a woodcut of the royal family grouped round their decorated Christmas Tree. In 1850,
Godey’s Lady’s Book
, a popular American almanac, published a copy of this picture, but ‘photoshopped’ it, removing Victoria’s tiara and Albert’s moustache, to make the scene more domestic for its readership. This picture was enormously influential in establishing Christmas trees in the USA (and may even explain why today American Christmas trees are different from European ones, denser and more regularly shaped than the droopier naturalistic European fashion). The almanac reproduced the picture in 1860, and by the 1870s Christmas trees had become widespread everywhere in both Britain and the USA.

There are no Christmas trees in the traditional fairy stories – partly because when the Grimm brothers were collecting them there were no Christmas trees at all, but also because the fairy stories are curiously lacking in any seasonal detail; occasionally we can guess the time of year in the broadest sense, but usually because of some detail of the plot – Snow White’s birth mother, for example, is sitting in a window with an ebony frame doing some sewing when she pricks her finger and a drop of blood falls into the snow on the window sill; it looks so pretty that she prays for a daughter ‘as red as blood, as black as ebony and as white as snow’. It must be winter – although even this is slightly surreal because people do not ordinarily sit with the window wide open in the cold of winter. Similarly, characters plough and harvest and hunt – all of which are seasonal activities. The seasons themselves, however, are implied but never described: oral-tradition stories must be ready for use at any moment and not tied too closely to time or place.

But the late appearance of Christmas trees in the real world and the absence of decorated trees more generally in the fairy stories feels a bit surprising, because the tradition of bringing the forest into the home or village to mark special holidays is very ancient. Flowering may was collected and brought home on Mayday; and holly and ivy were used to decorate homes for Christmas throughout the medieval period (as was mistletoe, the sacred plant of several pre-Christian religions, particularly the Druids). Both holly and ivy were quickly given Christian symbolism – ivy representing faith and eternal life (because ivy continues to grow on dead wood), and holly being a reminder of Christ’s crown of thorns, the prickly leaves sprinkled with blood-red berries. The popular carol ‘The Holly and the Ivy’, first found in print in 1709 and probably sung earlier than that, was a replacement for a far older version which had no Christian content at all.

There are ancient customs, too, of decorating trees; winding them in coloured wool was possibly the origin of the maypole, and dancing round them was a tradition that worried the church authorities. At Joan of Arc’s trial in 1431 the Inquisitors investigated in considerable detail a local custom in her area of going out to dance around a specific tree. (Joan’s trial is immensely illuminating. Her judges were committed to finding something to justify her inevitable death sentence; in this passage they were endeavouring to establish that she was inspired by pagan spirits or superstitions, but similarly in their investigation into her attempt to escape by jumping out of a window, we can learn a good deal about ideas of suicide; and in other parts of the record we can see very early concepts of what would become the characteristics of Christian ‘witchcraft’ in the following century.) Despite this discouragement, all through Germany – and especially in Bavaria – people danced round and decorated trees, particularly lime (linden, or
tilia
) trees, but this never occurs in any of the Grimms’ tales.

But whether the custom was started by ancient pagans or by nineteenth-century nobility, a Christmas tree – a real one with coloured lights, a trumpeting angel and a disparate collection of ornaments, some of which I have hung every year since I have had a home of my own – feels like a necessary part of my Christmas. At the same time I resent the ridiculous prices charged for trees, and so on Christmas Eve I went into the forest to steal one.

To be honest, my plans were neither as bold nor as wicked as this sounds. I did not take an axe, I took my long-handled garden loppers, which would struggle to cut through any living wood more than a few centimetres thick. I only wanted a very small tree.

The Purgatory Wood was planted in the 1970s, so from a commercial point of view it is nearly mature and should be clear-felled in the next few years. Like most commercial forestry of this type, it has a reasonably solid and usable vehicle track which runs in a big loop through the forest, originally for the purposes of planting, and now of maintaining and inspecting the trees and clearing the drains. These tracks have to carry quite heavy vehicles through the lifetime of the forest. On the wet steep slopes of a forest like the Purgatory Wood where the ground is naturally peaty and boggy and also full of large chunks of rock left by the retreating glaciers at the end of the last ice age, a common way of constructing such a track is to build up a sort of ridge or rampart of loose granite chips and then tamp down the surface. Obviously such a track is vulnerable to water erosion and even to being washed away by rain and flooding, so deep drainage ditches are often cut on both sides of the raised plinth, usually with pipes running through below the driving surface to carry the water under the road and off the hill. This means that you walk as it were above the level of the ground either side of you on a sort elevated causeway. Meanwhile, the planted trees are set back a bit from the track so that their roots will not damage the drainage runnels. Between track and trees then there is a strip of ground which forms a remarkable little micro-habitat of its own. It draws on both the artificial forest and the old land which was there before the forest was imposed on it. The thick trees give this little band shelter from the wind; the width of the track lets in some sunlight; the drainage cuts make it damp; and the disturbance of the ground while constructing it makes it irregular – huge boulders, for example, have been pushed aside by the original digger.

Unexpected things flourish here – mosses, ferns and fungi, but also grasses, wild flowers and scrubby bushes, and even small trees. The carnivorous plants of wet acid bog seem to do particularly well. The little spoon-shaped leaves of the sundew spread out into quite extensive patches that look red-gold because of the stiff little hairs covering the leaf surface and waiting hopefully for the arrival of a passing insect to supplement the limited nutrients in the acid soil. Each hair exudes a little drop of viscous liquid, so that in low sunshine they seem to be bejewelled by dew that does not evaporate in the daytime. Because of this:

Early herbalists believed that by ‘sipping the distilled water thereof . . . the naturall and lively heate in mens bodies is preserved and cherished.’ This was the origin of a whole range of potions based on the sundew’s syrupy seductive secretions . . . Throughout Europe it was mixed with a variety of spices to make a liquor called
Ros Solis
, which was regarded as a source of youthful looks and strength, virility and longevity. Inevitably sundew was also believed to be a love-charm, a reputation enhanced when its mysterious power to lure and entrap other creatures was eventually realised.
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But probably my favourite of these trackside carnivores (or part carnivores) is the butterwort, whose tiny orchid-like flowers stand singly on fine but sturdy stems well above the rosette of pale, fleshy, sticky leaves. It can apparently grow directly on wet rocks and always seems unlikely, unexpected in its refined delicacy.

There are other treats, too, along these forest bands. In Purgatory Wood there is a place where I have seen flag irises flowering with heather. And as a sudden total shock, a healthy clump of cottage peonies, violently pink amidst the sombre colour scheme of browns and greens. It has been suggested to me that these might mark the garden ground of a now-vanished cottage; but they are still startling and somehow inappropriate. The wild roses, bilberries, and, best of all, wild raspberries seem somehow more suited to the place. You enjoy all these unexpected little delights as you look down from the track, with an easy elevated view.

And, to cut to the chase, in places, usually right beside the track, little self-seeded spruces, which cannot break out into the light within the planted forest, germinate cheerfully and sit there inviting an act of minor yuletide theft. They grow crookedly and weakly, often close together or with several trunks, asymmetrical and scrubby. They have no future, and when their big parent trees are ready for harvesting the developer will arrive with vast machinery and widen and remake the whole track solid enough for the lorries to haul out the timber, and these little seedlings will be mowed down and abandoned. I am in effect looking through a rubbish dump for a little unwanted tree, less than a metre high. I search carefully for one that is reasonably straight, reasonably regular in its profile, and somehow measuring up to my idea of what a miniature Christmas tree should look like.

‘Methinks the lady doth protest too much.’ It is theft and I know it. As a matter of fact, Christmas tree theft is a real problem and on the increase. In the UK trees are most usually stolen already cut from retail outlets, like garden centres. It seems that most are taken singly and for personal use, but they can be a valuable haul too, almost impossible to identify and easily sold on. They are also stolen from the ground, cut down in the further corners of Christmas tree farms, or the distant reaches of plantation forest, often at night, and slipped away in 4x4s or trailers under cover of darkness. The thieves do pretty much what I was doing – slipping semi-legally onto a piece of land where it is not illegal to walk and then stealing the landowner’s property. In a sense it is a kind of poaching, except that wild animals (even bred wild animals like pheasants) cannot be anyone’s ‘property’, while wild plants (including planted ones) do belong to the landowner. This is ‘illegal logging’, to put it crudely, and the local version of this – for domestic use, fuel or whatever, is a small but significant part of deforestation, carbon emission growth and natural habitat spoliation. I am not entirely sure why I feel a sturdy inner confidence that it is somehow all right for me to take my Christmas tree in this way while being very strict about how any timber I purchase (for furniture or for building) is properly and legally cut.